It wasn’t way back that Democrats embraced an unequivocally pro-immigrant stance.
The get together as soon as outlined its immigration platform in opposition to the insurance policies of former President Donald Trump’s first time period: separating households detained on the border, a journey ban on Muslim-majority nations, and efforts to intestine the asylum system amongst them. In 2020, President Joe Biden ran on a message of undoing the cruelties of his predecessor, and in his first week in workplace, he signed a flurry of govt actions doing simply that.
A lot has modified within the 4 years since. Within the ultimate weeks of the 2024 marketing campaign, the rhetoric coming from Kamala Harris and most Democrats is decidedly completely different. There’s a better deal with border safety and fewer emphasis on immigrants’ rights and contributions to the nation.
This pivot didn’t come from nowhere. Border crossings reached file highs on the finish of 2023, fueling a Republican narrative of chaos that Individuals seem to have embraced. Although crossings have come down considerably all through 2024, extra Individuals nonetheless need to see immigration ranges lower than at any level because the early 2000s, simply after the 9/11 terror assaults. Polls present most voters help stricter border safety measures; a rising share desires mass deportations.
That is the political actuality Democrats have needed to confront forward of the presidential election: Broadly, Individuals maintain anti-immigration views. It doesn’t actually matter that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, was generally known as a champion for immigrant rights within the Senate and through her 2020 presidential bid. In a race towards Trump, who has upped the ante on his dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants within the ultimate stretch of the marketing campaign, she will’t afford to look weak on the border if she desires to win. That’s very true given immigration is a matter that has solely turn out to be extra salient among the many unbiased voters she’s courting in key states.
“Earlier than you may repair a coverage, first it’s essential to get elected,” mentioned Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and former senior adviser on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential marketing campaign who designed Sanders’s Latino vote outreach technique. “[Republicans] have bullied Democrats for years on this situation, and I believe it sensible for the Harris marketing campaign to not again down and take them on.”
Assuming Harris wins, what’s subsequent for Democrats and liberals on immigration? The progressive left that was as soon as so vocally pro-immigration has largely supported Harris regardless of her dash to the middle. That’s as a result of progressives know full nicely {that a} Trump administration could be worse. But when Trump and his xenophobic agenda are defeated, that might make room for a leftist offensive on immigration. What would that seem like, and can we see it throughout a Harris administration?
How a brand new politics of immigration emerged
Democrats’ 2020 platform didn’t even point out border safety. As a substitute, it targeted on increasing authorized immigration pathways and rolling again the US’s immigration detention regime. 4 years after former President Barack Obama was dubbed the “deporter in chief,” it appeared as if Trump had pushed Democrats to embrace a newfound ethical case for growing immigration.
However amid a difficult new actuality on the border and ensuing political stress, Biden superior immigration insurance policies that his Republican predecessor devised himself or would have no less than permitted of:
- He stored Trump’s Title 42 coverage in place for greater than two years, permitting him to show away swaths of immigrants on the border underneath the guise of defending public well being through the Covid-19 pandemic, even supposing public well being consultants noticed no proof that it was an efficient technique of curbing the virus.
- He instituted his model of Trump’s asylum transit ban. That rule permits immigration enforcement officers to show away migrants for various causes: if they don’t have legitimate journey and identification paperwork, in the event that they’ve traveled via one other nation with out making use of for asylum, in the event that they don’t present up at a port of entry at an appointed time, and extra.
- He issued a proclamation barring asylum seekers who cross the border with out permission from making use of for protections within the US when migrant crossings exceed a every day common of two,500 in per week.
Harris performed a job in executing this technique, and immigration was a part of her portfolio as vp from the early months of Biden’s presidency. She was tasked with addressing the basis causes of migration in a diplomatic position that primarily concerned directing private-sector funding to Central America.
Throughout a go to to Guatemala in June 2021, she delivered a controversial message to migrants: “Don’t come” to the US. When border crossings later spiked, she got here underneath hearth from Republicans as Biden’s failed “border czar,” a body that the Biden administration sought to rebut.
In February, Biden tried to make concrete progress on immigration by endorsing a bipartisan invoice that included border safety measures that Democrats wouldn’t have dreamed of supporting a couple of years prior, together with a brand new authority to shortly expel migrants arriving on the southern border at occasions of excessive demand. In change, Democrats would have gotten one thing they wished: closing gaps within the authorized immigration system which have left everybody from the kids of high-skilled international employees to Afghan refugees in limbo.
At first, Republicans coalesced across the invoice and it appeared as if it might move — that’s, till Trump started to foyer towards it, reportedly stating he wished to maintain the border a stay situation within the presidential election.
To make sure, Biden’s method hasn’t been fully targeted on border safety. It’s price noting that Biden has additionally superior one of many greatest efforts in over a decade to legalize undocumented immigrants. Underneath the brand new program, which is now on maintain as a consequence of a authorized problem, roughly 500,000 spouses of US residents and 50,000 of their stepchildren may very well be eligible to use for everlasting residence and get a inexperienced card with out having to go away the US.
However such strikes are the exception. The Biden period has usually seen Democrats transfer nearer to Trump on immigration relatively than additional away. Because the Democratic nominee, Harris has needed to navigate that new regular.
What would a Harris presidency imply for the politics of immigration?
Democrats outlined their immigration platform earlier than Biden determined to not search reelection, however Harris nonetheless must element how she would method the difficulty.
She has indicated in public appearances that her technique might be two-pronged, targeted on securing the border and growing earned pathways to citizenship, together with for Dreamers within the Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offers authorized protections to migrants who got here to the US with out authorization as kids.
She has repeatedly argued that Trump is concurrently not robust sufficient and never compassionate sufficient on immigration, whereas she appears intent on presenting herself as placing that stability.
That’s been clear in her rhetoric, however what precisely that stability appears to be like like in observe guarantees to be the topic of an intra-movement wrestle, one which pits pro-immigrant activists towards the get together’s relative border hawks.
Harris’s rhetoric through the marketing campaign has recommended a tougher-on-immigration method.
For example, when talking at her solely debate with Trump in regards to the border invoice that Democrats tried to move in February, she forged the failed invoice — and Trump’s advocacy towards it — as proof that the previous president isn’t severe about discovering a manner to enhance the state of affairs on the US-Mexico border: “He most well-liked to run on an issue as an alternative of fixing an issue,” Harris mentioned.
Throughout a Univision city corridor earlier this month, Harris once more criticized Trump for tanking the invoice. Nonetheless, this time, it was in response to a query from a voter whose mom died earlier than she might turn out to be a US citizen. Harris argued that the invoice might have created “a complete earned pathway to citizenship for hard-working folks” just like the voter’s mom.
That’s not a wholly correct portrayal of the invoice. It could have expanded present pathways to citizenship with the addition of 250,000 family- and employment-based visas and opened up a path to everlasting standing for Afghans who got here to the US after American forces withdrew from Afghanistan, but it surely was hardly complete in its method.
Nonetheless, the interplay confirmed Harris making an attempt to melt her tone, if not the border insurance policies she helps.
“Relying on what venue she’s speaking in, she frames the immigration situation a bit in another way,” mentioned Douglas Rivlin, a spokesperson for the immigrant advocacy group America’s Voice. “On Univision, her humanity got here via in a manner.”
Some progressives, nonetheless, see purpose to imagine that Harris could be extra pro-immigrant as a president than she has been as a campaigner.
Rocha famous that the Harris marketing campaign has employed immigrant activists, together with Alida Garcia, who led immigration advocacy on the immigration and felony justice reform advocacy group FWD.us, and Julie Chávez Rodriguez, the granddaughter of Latino civil rights activist and labor chief César Chávez. And that might recommend that her marketing campaign is considering easy methods to advance a pro-immigrant agenda inside the present political surroundings.
Progressives additionally appear to imagine that whereas they might not endorse all of Harris’s immigration insurance policies, they’ll nonetheless discover methods to work collectively, as they used to when she was a senator.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, recounted that Harris co-sponsored the primary invoice she ever launched, a response to Trump’s journey ban. It sought to make sure that folks had entry to authorized counsel in detention after they first arrived within the US.
“She cares in regards to the dignity and humanity of people that come to this nation,” Jayapal instructed Vox. “Whereas I’ve disagreed with a few of the immigration positions she has taken, I do know that she might be a associate with us on this situation, relatively than use immigrants as a political soccer the way in which Republicans and Donald Trump have.”
Jayapal’s feedback are a reminder of why the pro-immigrant left has given Harris scope to function towards Trump, whose rhetoric about immigrants, from his debunked feedback about Haitians consuming pets to his claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America, has not too long ago reached a brand new low. However the query is whether or not — and for a way lengthy — progressives’ goodwill towards Harris will final if Trump is defeated.
Concretely, immigration battles underneath a Harris administration would doubtless play out on a few of the identical points the place the left criticized Biden, together with his restrictions on asylum seekers on the border and the February border invoice that Harris has held up as a mannequin for Democrats going ahead. Activists nonetheless need most of the identical reforms Harris supported in 2020, comparable to swapping out deterrence-based insurance policies for insurance policies increasing secure pathways to return to the US and enhancing entry to asylum.
Nonetheless, the impulses that drive help for Trump’s immigration insurance policies aren’t more likely to simply fade away, even when the person himself recedes from public life. So, a President Harris would doubtless nonetheless face demand from the American public to prioritize border safety. That will not go away a lot room for her to undertake the mantle of the left’s priorities on immigration.
Advocates appear to acknowledge that actuality in addition to the sensible challenges of passing immigration reform in a divided Congress or issuing govt actions on immigration that may very well be challenged in courtroom.
“The American persons are fairly clear about what they need to have occur on immigration. They need the balanced method that Harris and the Democrats are for,” Rivlin mentioned.
Advocates are holding out hope that Harris can use her bully pulpit to vary the tone of the dialog about immigration in America, as she began to do on the Univision city corridor. In Rivlin’s view, “That’s some of the vital issues that should occur on immigration.”
